Actionable Analytics: ABC Framework

In the third part of our Digital Commerce Analytics series exploring various analytics frameworks and applying them to measure a digital commerce business, we take a look at the ABC Framework.

The ABC Framework is based on thinking about the shopper lifecycle as a sequential set of events. The sequence of events, at the risk of gross generalization, looks something like this:

Acquisition—Brand spends time and resources to attract prospects to the site

Engagement/Online Behavior—Brand deploys engaging product and content to engage prospects to find the product they are looking for

Conversion—Prospect finds the product and makes a purchase, thus converting into a customer

Repeat/Loyalty—Customer returns to the store to purchase another product and becomes a repeat buyer

This is a popular way of thinking about and organizing your KPIs. In fact, Google Analytics’ menu structure reflects this. The main menu of a standard Google Analytics instance includes the following options – Dashboards, Shortcuts, Intelligence Events, Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, Conversions.

To leverage this framework, organize and group your KPIs into these 3 categories. In each stage, there are certain KPIs that are relevant and even important to include within this framework. Use the diagram below as a model for your own dashboard.

If you are a Google Analytics user, then the fact that these metrics are already organized in this manner will be helpful in reporting against them. When viewed holistically, this framework can help identify lurking issues in specific aspects of your business that may surface as a GMV growth problem.

This framework also lends itself to organizing your metrics in an excel spreadsheet. Imagine a master analytics spreadsheet with 4 tabs. The first tab is the master tab that provides a high level overview of revenue on the site. The next 3 tabs could speak to each pillar of this framework specifically.

The Acquisition Tab would provide a ‘drill down’ view of the demand generation world, something along the lines of the following table.

The Onsite Behavior Tab would provide greater visibility to the effectiveness of the various merchandising strategies employed by the digital commerce team to keep the prospect engaged with the brand and help them find the right product. In a spreadsheet, the metrics that capture this data might look like this:

The Conversion Tab would track all conversion metrics and its funnel breakdown (i.e. various stages in a conversion funnel). This tab would look something like this:

Depending on the level of detail you want to accomplish with these tables, you can go as far as breaking these conversion metrics down by channel to gain deeper insight. It can help provide a view into traffic channel marketing effectiveness through correlation.

This is just a rough outline of how the ABC Framework can be leveraged to build a cohesive picture of business performance using standard web analytics data. Our next framework explores how to build a comprehensive business health monitor using data from multiple sources.